I suspect that Google will manually take this down soon.  They say they can only rearrange search result pages (SERPS) algorithmically, but we all know that they may consider  if (page = ‘obama’) { rank = 0 } an algorithm.

More on this by Danny

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.

MySQL Command Line Bar Chart


mysql> select date_format( create_time, '%Y-%m-%d') dt, repeat( '#', count(id)/20.0+1) dt from result group by dt;

Comand line stats are addictive. Nothing like real time… enjoy. Thanks to snipplr.

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.

Oracle Boards Sun and Takes MySQL Captive

I’m a little amazed that no-one seems to care that Oracle has bought MySQL through it’s purchase of Sun announced today. MySQL is used by over 40% of developers, and is one of the key backend databases for many of the sites you know and love.

The WSJ didn’t mention it. Nor did CNN. Bloomberg? Nope. Forbes? of course not. The NYT at least mentioned it at the bottom.

Although Oracle won’t own the open source version, they pretty much control the main development path. How would you feel if Microsoft was the lead for the Linux development? I thought so.

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.

@graywolf, @sugarrae and @streko team
up to defeat the Evil Empire.

“its kinda like star wars … when the republic turned into the empire … (hint google isnt the jedi knights)”
– @graywolf

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.

http://calacanis.com/2008/12/04/the-120-solution/

I agree with all but about 20% of it. ;)

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.

Emulate Humans, Not Robots

In the world of SEO or in the world of Social Marketing, you should strive to emulate humans, not robots.

Humans are more personal and they provide better quality, and people trust other people more than they do robots — in general for good reason.  So when you are putting content on a web page or building a social network presence, make yourself look as human as possible and not like a robot.

What do you mean “I look like a robot”

Robots are everywhere.

• They make websites without logos
• They use default wordpress themes
• They republished content that hasn’t been customized
• They make cookie-cutter websites
• Use logos instead of pictures for their Twitter profile
• They comment on blogs with random words and links

It comes down to quality, and it makes perfect sense.

When it comes to search engine spam, much of the recognizable spam is recognizable because the SEO did not take the care to make it look like a human created it.   They didn’t add value.  Perhaps they put up a default wordpress blog, just scraped a bunch of other people’s content, or threw up an affiliate feed. When you create any sort of automated or database driven site, the hardest part is to make it look hand-crafted.  Humans add value, and robots seldom do.

Add Value

Mahalo has done a good job of this. They are pretty much a scraper site, but with a human touch.  Jason Calacanis knows that if he continued filling Google with search results they would burn him and his 20Million seed round.   Mahalo adds content to each one of their result pages, and it has saved them. Google and Yahoo have both taken steps to follow suit.

Don’t be a TwitterBot

Social media is all about social interaction, and trust and authenticity is a primary ingredient.   You don’t look like some twitter bot, or corporate identity that doesn’t know about friendship because social media is all about friendship.  Customize your responses to people, and talk to them like you are a human not some alice bot.

Use a picture instead of a logo for your profile.

If I look through my followers on twitter, I can quickly pick out the real faces from the logos.  I follow very few logos.  In fact, a user has to try 10x as hard to win me over if they are just a logo.

Robots aren’t all bad

In the business world, robots are necessary to get quantity and scale at a reasonable price. You can’t index the worlds information without a little help from some really smart machines. But, what Google does is strive to make it’s robots emulate human choice, not the other way around. Similarly, I couldn’t survive online without my robots. They organize my content, bring me keywords, and suggest new topics. BUT they have to be monitored and their output has to be put through a humanizing filter, usually a human. It comes down to a balance of what you can do to make things automated, but maintain human-grade quality.

Get your bots to emulate humans and don’t let your humans emulate robots.

Happy scripting.

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.

How do You Find the Intersection of the Files?
To fiind the intersection of the resulting files, I found a simple way to do it on the command-line.

grep -f file1 file2

Done. That’s easy, no?

This takes each line of file1 and uses it as a pattern to match in file2. Grep is a command line application found natively on all linux distributions and mac os’s. You can use it on windows xp or vista by installing cygwin.

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.

Presidential Communication Will Be Google-Branded.

Presidential Communication Will Be Google-Branded.

President-elect Barack Obama has announced that he will be using YouTube to send out his fireside chats every week. The hype-driven media once again lost the plot and failed to realize that he is endorsing a specific brand and promoting it every week to the American people by featuring YouTube as his main provider. Every week, millions of americans and billions of non-americans will see the YouTube logo next to our president.

Is YouTube the new presidential Seal? You can’t see the whole american flag on the screen, but the YouTube logo is in tact and on the screen 100% of the time during the first video.

What the average american, and perhaps reporter, doesn’t realize is that uploading a video to the internet is fairly simple. You don’t need Google, you don’t need YouTube, you simply need something to convert it into flash format and a rudimentary flash application to play it. You can even let people embed it — it’s embarrassingly simple for even the most mediocre of webmasters.

What’s next? Will he be flying on the “Virgin America One”, calling Putin on a “Verizon Hotline”, or maybe his motorcade will look like a NASCAR with a Valvoline and Penzoil paint job? Is the internet a series of Tubes again? I *thought* Obama would be the internet savvy president, but I was wrong.

In an embarrassingly small disclaimer, the Obama adminstration notes that they are making the video available on Yahoo, AOL and MSN. Nice. What about the hundreds of other video networks and video services? This is an outrage. Obama should have posted the video in it’s raw form and let whoever pick it up who wishes.

Keep the brands out of my government.

Don’t make me regret my vote.

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Webroot-Says-Hackers-Exploit-Google-Trends-With-Malware/

This article from eWeek (again, I use mainstream loosely) explains how hackers use Google Trends to figure out what is a timely news article people might search for, then monopolize on the search terms by writing fake blogs.

Is there any reason to mention Google in this article, other than making it worth reading? You could replace “google trends” with “reading the newspaper” and it’s just as plausible. The mere mention of Google is the only reason this article is interesting. Get a clue eWeek.

Oh wait… they have one. They write an article about Google, put GOOG in it and it comes up during a google finance search… remind me to….

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.

Firefox Has Broken a Critcial Browser Feature.

But you need to get your shit together.  Why do you auto-complete itunes when I start out a web site with ‘w-e-b’?  It doesn’t  make sense.  I visit WEBmasterworld.com 10 times a day.

Auto-complete is KING.  Google finally put it on their homepage.  Everyone uses it for web-forms, so much so that it’s a feature on millions of toolbars.

So why did you break it in 3.0?

Are you upset that I tried Chrome?

She meant nothing to me.   I swear.

It’s just that…  that… well, we haven’t really been seeing eye to eye lately.  Maybe you and I should just go somewhere quiet for a few days, and I’ll recode that buggy auto complete?  Yeah?  You’d like that too?

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.